Tag: 2012_Election

Illinois Primary and GOP Hopefuls

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Flag Waving
Flag Waving1

For the first time since I moved to Chicago, the Illinois GOP primary might actually be contested…

Since Super Tuesday, I’ve been reading a lot of coverage that ignores the challenges that the delegate count poses to Rick Santorum. Here’s one quick test to see if you have a good sense for this stuff. Is Illinois a must-win state for Mr. Santorum?

The answer is basically yes.

No one state is technically a must-win, and for that matter, winning the statewide vote in Illinois has no direct bearing on the delegate count (all of its delegates are awarded by Congressional district).

But Mr. Santorum will have to win in most places like Illinois to have a decent chance at preventing Mr. Romney from securing the nomination. And he’ll have to win in states much more challenging than Illinois — possibly as challenging as California — to overtake Mr. Romney in the delegate count and have the stronger case that he should be the nominee.

Although some awareness of the delegate math is almost assuredly better than none, you really need a detail-oriented approach to come to proper conclusions about this kind of question. For instance, you need to know that Texas’s delegate allocation is quite proportional, while New Jersey’s is strictly winner-take-all based on the statewide vote, while California is mostly winner-take-all by Congressional district. And most states have some kind of twist in their rules — proportional states can become winner-take-all if candidates meet (or their opponents fail to achieve) certain vote thresholds.

 

(click here to continue reading FiveThirtyEight: Why Illinois May be a ‘Must Win’ for Santorum – NYTimes.com.)

Footnotes:
  1. actually the Chicago flag, not Illinois flag, which I don’t seem to have taken a photo of [↩]

GOP Clown Car – Post Super Tuesday Edition

Seth Anderson0 comment

Who Is To Blame?
Who Is To Blame?

In the weeks since we last looked at the GOP delegate scramble, primaries and caucuses have been held in Michigan, Arizona, Washington, Alaska, Georgia, Idaho, Massachusetts, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Vermont, Virginia, Wyoming, Guam, Northern Marianas Islands, Kansas, and the Virgin Islands.

Races of note: and a few haphazard comments

Arizona – despite national GOP instructions for proportional delegate allocation, Arizona awarded all 29 delegates to Romney.

The Arizona Republican Party has said the winner of the February 28 primary will be awarded all of its 29 delegates, despite the Republican National Committee mandate for pre-April event states to award delegates proportionally. The scheduling of Arizona’s Republican primary resulted in the loss of half of its expected delegates to the Republican national convention.

Michigan – Santorum nearly won, Romney squeaked out with 16 delegates to Santorum’s 14. Romney’s status as son of a fairly popular Michigan governor might have helped, but not much. One of the best lines came out of this primary race where Romney claimed the trees in Michigan were the right height, whatever the hell that means. Sounded like a faulty sub-routine in his programming.

Washington – a non-binding caucus, actual selection won’t be completed until May 30th, so who knows.

Northern Mariana Islands
Northern Mariana Islands

Guam, and Northern Marianas Islands – 18 delegates, but the votes are not binding, which is a fancy way of saying the delegates can vote any which way. The current population of Guam is in the neighborhood of 180,000, yet only 215 people voted for Mitt Romney, and nobody voted for anyone else. Yikes, that is less than 1%. In the Northern Marianas Islands (population 53,000 or so), Romney got 740 votes, Santorum 53, Gingrich 28 votes, and Ron Paul 27. Big turnout on the islands! Weather must have been cold.

Georgia – Newt Gingrich’s home state. Romney still won 15 delegates to Gingrich’s 47.

Ohio – Romney won, partially because Santorum’s organization didn’t get on the ballot everywhere. The popular vote was very close: 456,513 to 446,225, but the delegate count was not (35 to 21).

In three of the state’s 16 congressional districts, including two that are near Ohio’s border with Pennsylvania, Santorum will lose any delegates he might have won because his campaign failed to meet the state’s eligibility requirements months ago. Those three districts alone take 9 delegates out of a total of 66 off the table for Santorum. But it gets worse: Nine more Ohio delegates may also be in jeopardy. Sources say that in six other congressional districts — the third, fourth, eighth, tenth, twelfth and sixteenth — Santorum submitted fewer names than required to be eligible for all three delegates up-for-grabs in each district. That means even if he wins in those places, he might not be able to receive the full contingent of delegates. In the three districts where Santorum did not submit a delegate slate at all, he will not be able to receive any delegates. In the six where he submitted only a partial slate, he is eligible to be awarded only the number of delegates he submitted, assuming he wins a particular district.

(click here to continue reading Rick Santorum’s Ohio Delegate Problems Pile Up – ABC News.)

Virginia – we discussed this previously, only Romney and Ron Paul were organized enough to get on the ballot. Thus, Romney got 43 delegates, Ron Paul 3.

Super Delegates – as of today, Romney has 27, Ron Paul 1, Newt Gingrich 3, and Rick Santorum 2.

To Think I saw it on Morgan Street
To Think I saw it on Morgan Street

By my count, I have the current totals as:

  • Romney – 456
  • Rick Santorum – 217
  • Newt Gingrich – 107
  • Ron Paul – 47

but of course, those numbers are a bit soft with all the malleable counts for various caucuses and so on. The New York Times delegate tracker shows the count as of this morning as:

  • Romney – 454
  • Rick Santorum – 184
  • Newt Gingrich – 118
  • Ron Paul – 66

The Greenpapers lists hard total as:

  • Romney – 354
  • Rick Santorum – 131
  • Newt Gingrich – 107
  • Ron Paul – 23

Not over yet, in other words…

Severe Conservative Syndrome

Seth Anderson0 comment

All Poems Are Accidents
All Poems Are Accidents

Mitt Romney’s entire campaign seems predicated upon running against an imaginary person that Romney calls Obama – though it isn’t anything like the real President, nor the real Obama’s record.

Paul Krugman writes:

But Mr. Romney is seeking the Republican presidential nomination, and whatever his personal beliefs may really be — if, indeed, he believes anything other than that he should be president — he needs to win over primary voters who really are severely conservative in both his intended and unintended senses.

So he can’t run on his record in office. Nor was he trying very hard to run on his business career even before people began asking hard (and appropriate) questions about the nature of that career.

Instead, his stump speeches rely almost entirely on fantasies and fabrications designed to appeal to the delusions of the conservative base. No, President Obama isn’t someone who “began his presidency by apologizing for America,” as Mr. Romney declared, yet again, a week ago. But this “Four-Pinocchio Falsehood,” as the Washington Post Fact Checker puts it, is at the heart of the Romney campaign.

How did American conservatism end up so detached from, indeed at odds with, facts and rationality? For it was not always thus. After all, that health reform Mr. Romney wants us to forget followed a blueprint originally laid out at the Heritage Foundation!

My short answer is that the long-running con game of economic conservatives and the wealthy supporters they serve finally went bad. For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America’s defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Over time, however, this strategy created a base that really believed in all the hokum — and now the party elite has lost control.

The point is that today’s dismal G.O.P. field — is there anyone who doesn’t consider it dismal? — is no accident. Economic conservatives played a cynical game, and now they’re facing the blowback, a party that suffers from “severe” conservatism in the worst way. And the malady may take many years to cure.

(click here to continue reading Severe Conservative Syndrome – NYTimes.com.)

It was difficult to measure how much ground Mr. Romney has gained or lost, particularly given how the Republican Party has changed since 2008. He reminded the audience of his conservative record in a state that he called the most liberal in the country.

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Mr. Romney said, adding “severely” to the text of his speech for emphasis. “I fought against long odds in a deep blue state.”

(click here to continue reading Romney’s Record as Governor Resumes Central Role in Nomination Fight – NYTimes.com.)

Just for fun, using the built-in OS X Lion dictionary, here are the top synonyms for “severe”:

  • severe injuries: acute, very bad, serious, grave, critical, dreadful, terrible, awful; dangerous, parlous, life-threatening; formal grievous. ANTONYMS minor, negligible.
  • severe storms: fierce, violent, strong, powerful, intense; tempestuous, turbulent. ANTONYMS gentle.
  • a severe winter: harsh, bitter, cold, bleak, freezing, icy, arctic, extreme; informal brutal. ANTONYMS mild.
  • a severe headache: excruciating, agonizing, intense, dreadful, awful, terrible, unbearable, intolerable; informal splitting, pounding, screaming. ANTONYMS slight.
  • a severe test of their stamina: difficult, demanding, tough, arduous, formidable, exacting, rigorous, punishing, onerous, grueling. ANTONYMS easy, simple.
  • severe criticism: harsh, scathing, sharp, strong, fierce, savage, scorching, devastating, trenchant, caustic, biting, withering. ANTONYMS mild.
  • severe tax penalties: extortionate, excessive, unreasonable, inordinate, outrageous, sky-high, harsh, stiff; punitive.
  • they received severe treatment: harsh, stern, hard, inflexible, uncompromising, unrelenting, merciless, pitiless, ruthless, draconian, oppressive, repressive, punitive; brutal, cruel, savage. ANTONYMS lenient, lax.
  • his severe expression: stern, dour, grim, forbidding, disapproving, unsmiling, unfriendly, somber, grave, serious, stony, steely; cold, frosty. ANTONYMS friendly, genial.
  • a severe style of architecture: plain, simple, austere, unadorned, unembellished, unornamented, stark, spartan, ascetic; clinical, uncluttered. ANTONYMS fancy, ornate.

Amusingly, most do seem to apply to the Republican Party, actually, whether “Dog Mittens” Romney intended them or not. And many of the antonyms are fairly accurate descriptions of Romney! minor, negligible, slight, simple, fancy, and so on…

What Are The Rules If The GOP Contest Goes To Convention?

Seth Anderson0 comment

Unconventional Solutions
Unconventional Solutions

Noted for future reference. As a self-described political junkie, I’d be very much amused by a brokered convention.

It’s the scenario every political reporter, and every West Wing fan, wants to see for real: a brokered convention. And after a week in which the GOP’s presumed frontrunner Mitt Romney sucked up three defeats, two CPAC polling wins, and a muddy apparent victory in Maine, people are talking about the prospect once again.

Take Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC). “It could very well go to the convention,” he told CNN at CPAC Thursday.

Two questions arise: could the delegate-allocating process really not be resolved by the time the party meets for its convention in Tampa? And what are the rules for how things play out if it does?

 

(click here to continue reading What Are The Rules If The GOP Contest Goes To Convention? | TPM2012.)

Maine Edition of the GOP Clown Car

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Triangular Logic
Triangular Logic

Another update to the long-running reality show that is the GOP nomination process, again regarding a caucus state with non-binding votes. The NYT gave 11 to Romney, and 10 to Paul. However, Ron Paul thinks he might have won:

Ron Paul’s campaign is claiming that it could still win the presidential preference poll in the Maine caucus because of a county that postponed its vote and will hold its caucus next Saturday, Feb. 18.

On Saturday, the Maine Republican Party declared Mitt Romney the winner of the presidential preference vote, which he led by 194 ballots based on the caucuses that have been held so far.

State Republicans said they considered the results of the straw poll final. However, Washington County, in the easternmost part of the state, postponed its caucus after a snowstorm was forecast there. The Washington County G.O.P. Chair, Chris Gardner, said his county would conduct the straw poll at its caucuses and will report the results to the state.

All if this will be moot unless Mr. Paul is able to make up 194 votes in the county.

…

The results of the presidential preference poll are nonbinding and serve mostly for vanity — delegates are selected through a separate vote at the caucus sites. Although this is also true in most other Republican caucus states, Maine’s delegate selection process is especially cumbersome and can potentially reward candidates whose supporters are more enthusiastic and who sit through the entire process, which can be hours long.

Mr. Paul’s campaign has predicted that it will win the most delegates from Maine regardless of the result of the straw poll.

(click here to continue reading Could Ron Paul Still Win Maine? – NYTimes.com.)

Smile Through It All
Smile Through It All

And about those caucus delegates…Rachel Maddow interviewed Ron Paul strategist Doug Wead, and their conversation went something like this, transcribed by Crooks and Liars:

WEAD: I watch television and I see them saying Romney has this many delegates and Santorum this many, and as you know, not a single delegate has been awarded from Iowa or Minnesota or Missouri or Colorado or Nevada, and as you point out, we’re tracking this at the precinct level, we think we have the majority of them, we think we’ve won in Iowa, we won in Minnesota, we won in Colorado, and Missouri is yet to be seen. And we think we probably won in Nevada, because we’re counting the precinct votes. The only thing that I might add there is nothing wrong or deceptive about this, anybody can stay. Woody Allen says 80% of success is showing up. Our people show up, and they have a right to do that, and they are committed, and so they are running as delegates at the precinct level to the county convention where they will again run as delegates from the county convention to the state convention.

MADDOW: Are they being open at the precinct level, are they being open about the fact they will support Ron Paul no matter what happened at the caucus or is this sort of a sneak attack strategy?

WEAD: No, they are open. Anybody can stay, and anybody can vote, in fact, the party is resisting this as often as they can. There have been occasions where they dismissed the meeting and relocated in another place to try to keep our people from participating. There are verbal memos that come down from the campaign. In Minnesota there was a verbal memo. They don’t care to put it in print in which they told all the establishment Republicans don’t vote for any delegate under the age of 40, because they knew it would be a Ron Paul supporter. So we’re winning fair and square. and I should point out all these rules were changed for Mitt Romney. They were changed so that the establishment Republicans could give Mitt Romney a chance to win this nomination, in spite of evangelical resistance in the South. So it’s all been set up for Romney, we’re the poor guys, we don’t have Goldman Sachs money, we’re playing by their rules and yes, we have a smile on our face because right now the big story missed until you just broke it tonight is probably we have more delegates than anybody in the race right now. when all this is finalized.

Here are the goals, primary and secondary:

MADDOW: I’m assuming that your overall goal is to make Ron Paul the nominee for president. I realize that is what you are — you are in it for. Say you don’t achieve that but you have amassed a large number of delegates, what would be the purpose of amassing all those delegates, what would you use it for?

WEAD: As you know, anybody who is an observer of modern political history knows a brokered convention is remote. There are delegates that will move to another candidate if they get a box of Godiva chocolates on their pillow at the hotel in Tampa that night. Ron Paul delegates won’t go even if they are offered Secretary of State. So if we can get do a convention with a sizeable number of delegates and if Gingrich stays alive and Santorum stays alive, we could have a brokered convention. It would be a huge show, even though there is a remote possibility. And of course there are many things we want. We would like to see the federal reserve audited for example and Romney is the only candidate left in the Republican party who hasn’t taken that step. And with good reason, his honey is coming from Goldman Sachs.

Oh, and Mitt Romney seems to have picked up another Super Delegate (Romney now has 18)

GOP clown car – Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota Edition

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Tell It Like It Is
Tell It Like It Is

I don’t have much to say about the Colorado, Missouri, and Minnesota Edition of the GOP clown car, especially since there weren’t any delegates actually at stake – except in abstract terms. The only update I have is that Mitt Romney seems to have gained a new SuperDelegate (now having 17).

Note that zero national convention delegates are allocated during the Colorado/Minnesota Precinct Caucuses – national convention delegates are first elected in March.)

(click here to continue reading Colorado Republican Delegation 2012.)

and Missouri:

Missouri Republican non-binding Primary. Today’s primary has no effect on delegate allocation.

(click here to continue reading Missouri Republican Delegation 2012.)

Inviting Entrance
Inviting Entrance

Dave Weigel writes:

My old colleague Jack Shafer once praised “horse race” coverage of presidential politics. “Every political reporter I know,” he wrote, “yearns to cover a deadlocked presidential convention.” It’s true. So why has every single primary spawned dull, topsy-turvy—and ultimately wrong—stories about how it “Marked the End” of one candidate or another? Tuesday’s caucus-goers have done us a real solid, forcing the media to confront the truth: The Republican race will last until April at the very least. And it’s in everybody’s interest—Candidates! Voters! Reporters! Whatever David Gergen is!—that it drags on that long or longer.

We know the race will last to April thanks to pure, heartless algebra. The 2012 Republican nominee will need to win 1,144 delegates. The number of delegates semi-officially pledged to candidates as I type this out: 161. The number of delegates that will be pledged by the end of Super Tuesday, one month from now: 662. Rick Santorum could take every single delegate away from Mitt Romney (Good luck in Massachusetts!) and be barely halfway to the nomination.

It feels slower than the last primary. Because it’s much, much slower. A catastrophic and months-long leap-frog competition forced 21 states into 2008 Super Tuesday primaries or caucuses. By Feb. 5, 2008, 1,069 of the GOP’s delegates—41 percent of the total—had been chosen. It was a fluke, no one wanted it to happen again, but it turned out like a childhood trauma in reverse. So much fun was had, the “this can wrap up in a hurry” concept stuck around.

(click here to continue reading Why the Republican primary will not end anytime soon – Slate Magazine.)

Options
Options

Nate Silver:

Mr. Romney has had deep problems so far with the Republican base, going 1-for-4 in caucus states where turnout is dominated by highly conservative voters. Mr. Romney is 0-for-3 so far in the Midwest, a region that is often decisive in the general election. He had tepid support among major blocks of Republican voters like evangelicals and Tea Party supporters, those voters making under $50,000 per year, and those in rural areas. Instead, much of his support has come from the wealthy areas that Charles Murray calls Super ZIPs — few of which are in swing states in the general election.

Meanwhile, polls show that a large number of Republicans have tepid enthusiasm for their field. And this has been reflected in the turnout so far, which is down about 10 percent from 2008 among Republican registrants and identifiers.

These are not the hallmarks of a race with a dominant candidate. Nor, even, of a race with a candidate like John Kerry, the best of a somewhat weak lot of Democrats in 2004, but one whom the party settled upon fairly quickly.

(click here to continue reading G.O.P. Race Has Hallmarks of Prolonged Battle – NYTimes.com.)

Nevada GOP Clown Car Results 2012

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Back Seat Drivers
Back Seat Drivers

In the interest of completeness, I’ll post this before I forget:

Saturday 4 February 2012: Republican Party Precinct Caucuses meet. Each Precinct Caucus casts votes for Presidential candidates and chooses the precinct’s delegates to the County Conventions. There are 1,835 caucuses (the party published the 1,835 number before the caucuses but the certifed vote showed 1,800 caucuses). Most caucuses run from noon to 3p PST but at least one caucus in Clark County (home to possibly half of all Republicans expected to participate) will begin at 7p PST. The party plans to announce the first set of results at 5p and the second set at 10p. (0600 GMT).

28 National Convention delegates are proportionally bound to Presidential contenders based on today’s caucus vote. A 3.57% threshold is required in order for a contender to be allocated delegates [1 / 28 delegates = 3.57%]. For those candidates receiving 3.57% or more of the vote: The number of delegates = 28 × (candidate’s popular vote) ÷ (total statewide vote). Round to the nearest whole number. The rules for rounding to too few or too many delegates are not known.

(click here to continue reading Nevada Republican Delegation 2012.)

  • Dog Mittens Romney – 14 delegates
  • Newtonious Leroy Gingrich – 6 delegates
  • Ronald The Clown Paul – 5 delegates
  • Sticky-Rick Santorum – 3 delegates

And with addition of so-called Super Delgates, I have the current total as:

  1. Romney – 93 (8.14% of 1,143 total delegates needed for majority)
  2. Gingrich – 36 (3.15% of total needed)
  3. Paul – 14 (1.22% of total needed)
  4. Santorum – 10 (0.87% of total needed)

Frank Rich on Mitt Romney

Seth Anderson0 comment

Empty Spaces
Empty Spaces

A Frank Rich article worth reading, especially since odds are that Mitt Robot will be the GOP candidate for president, even if his own party is not enthusiastic about him.

Or as Frank Rich puts it, His greatest passion is something he’s determined to keep secret.

As this narrative has it, Americans are at least comfortable with old, familiar Mitt—heaven knows he’s been running long enough. He may be a bore and a flip-­flopper, but he doesn’t frighten the ­horses. His steady sobriety will win the day once the lunatic Newt has finished blowing himself up. As one prominent Romney surrogate, the Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz, has it, Romney is “the most vetted candidate out there.” Maybe—if you assume there will be no more questions about Bain, the Cayman Islands, the expunged internal records from Romney’s term as governor, or his pre-2010 tax returns. Or about the big dog that has yet to bark, and surely will by October: Romney’s long career as a donor to and lay official of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. But you can also construct an alternative narrative—that the vetting has barely even begun, and that the “Mitt Romney” we’ve been sold since 2008 is a lazy media construct, a fictional creation, or maybe even a hoax.

…

To escape the twin taints of Bain and his one-percenter’s under–15 percent tax rate, some Republican elders are urging Romney to “stake his campaign on something larger and far more important than his own business expertise” (The Wall Street Journal editorial page) or, as Fred Barnes suggested more baldly, to find “a bigger idea to deflect attention from Bain.” But even Mitt’s own spokesman, Eric Fehrnstrom, once described him (to the Des Moines Register) as “not a very notional leader.” Romney is incapable of an arresting turn of phrase, let alone a fresh idea. Running on empty, he resorts to filling out his canned campaign orations with lengthy recitations of the lyrics from patriotic anthems. (“Believe in America” is his campaign slogan.) Take away the bogus boasts about “job creation” at Bain and the disowned Romneycare, and what else is there to Mitt Romney? Mainly, his unspecified service to his church and his perfect marriage. That reduces him to the stature of the Republican presidential candidate he most resembles, Thomas Dewey—in both his smug and wooden campaign style and in the overrating of his prospects by the political culture. Even the famously dismissive description of Dewey popularized by the Washington socialite Alice Roosevelt Longworth—as “the little man on the wedding cake”—seems to fit Mitt.

No Republican has ever won the nomination after losing the South Carolina primary. No incumbent president since FDR has won reelection with an unemployment rate higher than 7.2 percent on Election Day, and ours currently stands at 8.5 percent. No candidate with a 58 percent disapproval rating—especially Newt—is likely to win a national election, even for dogcatcher. But surely someone has to be nominated by the Republicans, and someone has to win in November.

“This race is getting to be even more interesting,” said Romney when conceding to Gingrich in South Carolina. As always, it’s impossible to know whether he really meant what he said or not, but this much is certain: He will continue to be the least interesting thing about it.

(click here to continue reading Frank Rich on Mitt Romney — New York Magazine.)

Or the whole article on one page, here

Mitt Speaks. Oh, No!

Seth Anderson0 comment

Hollow Within
Hollow Within

Ms. Collins keeps her Dog Mittens Romney streak alive:

Does anybody truly believe that Romney is planning to spend any presidential time dreaming up ways to fix the safety net for the benefit of the very poor? Be real. This is the guy who drove to Canada with the family dog strapped on the roof.

(click here to continue reading Mitt Speaks. Oh, No! – NYTimes.com.)

in a discussion of Mitt Romney’s latest gaffe — gaffe as defined by articulating what is actually on his mind:

On the morning after the Florida primary, Mitt Romney bounded out of bed, inhaled the sweet air of victory, donned his new cloak of invulnerability… and went on CNN to announce that he doesn’t care about poor people.

“I’m not concerned about the very poor,” he told a slightly stunned-looking Soledad O’Brien.

Whenever the topic turns to wealth, or the lack thereof, some inner demon seems to make Romney say something that sounds ridiculous, offensive or ridiculously offensive.

Campaign Finance Reports Show Super PAC Donors

Seth Anderson0 comment

Beer Money at the MCA
Beer Money

The money race is unfortunately just as important, or even more important than any other factor in the 2012 election.

The filings to the Federal Election Commission, the first detailed look at a crucial source of support for Dog Mittens Romney, showed his ability to win substantial backing from a small number of his party’s most influential and wealthy patrons, each contributing to the super PAC far more than the $2,500 check each could legally write to his campaign.

All told, the group, Restore Our Future, raised about $18 million from just 200 donors in the second half of 2011.

Millions of dollars came from financial industry executives, including Mr. Romney’s former colleagues at Bain Capital, who contributed a total of $750,000; senior executives at Goldman Sachs, who contributed $385,000; and some of the most prominent and politically active Republicans in the hedge fund world, three of whom gave $1 million each: Robert Mercer of Renaissance Technologies; Paul Singer of Elliott Management, and Julian Robertson of Tiger Management.

Harlan Crow, the Texas construction magnate, gave $300,000 personally and through his company. William Koch, whose brothers Charles and David are among the country’s most prominent backers of conservative causes, gave $1 million personally or through Oxbow Carbon, the energy company he founded. Members of the Walton family, founders of the Walmart chain, gave over $200,000, while Bob Perry — a wealthy home builder who has long been the top patron of Mr. Romney’s erstwhile rival, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas — chipped in $500,000 in early December.

But as Mr. Romney sailed to an overwhelming victory in Florida’s primary on Tuesday night, fund-raising documents filed by President Obama showed the kind of financial juggernaut he will face if he becomes his party’s nominee: Mr. Obama reported raising a total of $140 million in 2011, far eclipsing the $57 million Mr. Romney raised for his campaign for the year.

(click here to continue reading Campaign Finance Reports Show ‘Super PAC’ Donors – NYTimes.com.)

From the NYT article, the top ten Romney investors. If there was any way I could avoid them, I would, but odds are long that I’d ever encounter any of these people or companies.

Edward Conard

Investor and former top executive at Bain Capital, the private equity firm Mr. Romney helped start.

 $1.0 million
Robert Mercer

Co-chief executive at Renaissance Technologies Corp., a hedge fund company.

 $1.0 million
John Paulson

Billionaire founder of the hedge fund Paulson & Company. Well known for earning billions of dollars betting against the subprime mortgage market.

 $1.0 million
Bob Perry

Houston homebuilder who was a major financier of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in 2004.

 $1.0 million
Julian Robertson

Founder of Tiger Management, a hedge fund.

 $1.0 million
Paul Singer

Manager of Elliot Associates hedge fund.

 $1.0 million
Eli Publishing Inc.

Shares a Provo, Utah, address with F8 LLC.

 $1.0 million
F8 LLC

Shares a Provo, Utah, address with Eli Publishing Inc.

 $1.0 million
Melaleuca

An Idaho-based health and wellness products company; donations were made under the names of four associated companies.

 $1.0 million
Rooney Holdings Inc.

Private investment firm based in Tulsa, Okla. Its chief executive is Francis Rooney, a former U.S. Ambassador to the Vatican.

 $1.0 million

The full list is here, where you can also see that Obama’s donors are from a much more diverse background. In fact, currently there are only two Obama donors who gave $1,000,000 or more: Jeffrey Katzenberg,Chief executive of Dreamworks Animation, who contributed $2 million; and Service Employees International Union, a labor union with 2.1 million members, contributing $1 million.

Florida Edition of GOP Clown Car

Seth Anderson0 comment

Like we noted earlier, despite all the talk of momentum, whatever the hell that is, the primary season is not over yet. Gingrich, and Ron Paul are going to keep going on as long as they have enough money to do so, and they would be stupid not to continue.

Newt Gingrich has been predicting that the battle for the Republican presidential nomination will last “until June or July, unless Romney drops out sooner,” but the magnitude of his loss to Mitt Romney in Florida’s primary on Tuesday could force him to recalibrate.

Romney 46.4%

Gingrich 31.9%

Santorum 13.4%

Paul 7.0%

It is possible, of course, that the contest will stretch on for several months, largely because the voting so far has allocated only 5 percent of the delegates needed to claim the nomination. On Wednesday, the battle turns to states like Nevada that award their delegates on a proportional basis, so even coming in second will have a payoff, unlike in Florida, where the winner takes all.

(click here to continue reading Gingrich Pins Hopes on Super Tuesday and Delegate Shares – NYTimes.com.)

To update my calculations, and including Automatic Delegates a/k/a Super Delegates, I have the current allocation as:

  • Dog Mittens Romney – 78
  • Newtonious Leroy Gingrich – 28
  • Ronald Paul – 9
  • Sticky-Rick Santorum – 7

Not close to over, yet.

GOP Clown Car 2 1 2012
GOP Clown Car 2-1-2012.PNG

The Real Legacy of Newt Gingrich

Seth Anderson0 comment

Dog on a Bender
Dog on a Bender

Gail Collins keeps her streak alive

The far right seems to be particularly indifferent to bad-behavior issues. Maybe this is because their supporters know that sinning social conservatives operate at a disadvantage. It is way easier to avoid the hypocrisy label if you’re a straying civil libertarian whose family values speeches mainly involve encouraging kids to donate money to feed impoverished people in Africa. You’re not going to be charged with speaking out of both sides of your mouth when the first side is talking about supporting Doctors Without Borders.

Conservative voters also like expressions of remorse and promises to reform. When all else fails, they have even been known to argue that everybody does it. “I’m just saying, they all have stinky feet,” former Congressman J. C. Watts, a Baptist preacher, said while he was campaigning for Newt in South Carolina.

Although actually, when you’re talking about 1) Committing adultery, 2) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress, 3) Committing adultery, 4) Allegedly asking your wife to let you keep the mistress on the side and 5) Divorcing your wife while she’s sick to marry your mistress … it’s pretty clear everybody doesn’t do it.

But in a way, Watts is right. (And we do like that stinky feet line.) Everybody has something. Rick Santorum lusted in his heart for earmarks. Mitt Romney drove to Canada with the family Irish setter strapped on the car roof.

And Newt argues his checkered past is actually an advantage. He suggested to the Christian Broadcasting Network that “it may make me more normal than somebody who wanders around seeming perfect and maybe not understanding the human condition, and the challenges of life for normal people.”

Take that, Mitt.

(click here to continue reading The Real Legacy of Newt Gingrich – NYTimes.com.)

 

Polls Show Romney Ahead

Seth Anderson0 comment

Rooms 75 cents
Rooms 75 cents

I am no statistician, and never took any statistical analysis classes in school, but a six point lead two days before the Florida primary is overwhelming? Seems like a close race to me.

But new polls suggest that Mr. Gingrich is trailing badly in Florida. A survey released on Saturday night by The Tampa Bay Times and several other Florida news organizations found Mr. Romney ahead, 42 percent to 31 percent. (The telephone survey of 500 registered voters likely to vote in the Florida Republican primary was conducted Tuesday through Thursday by Mason Dixon Polling and Research. The margin of sampling error is plus or minus 5 percentage points.)

(click here to continue reading Gingrich Presses Attack as Polls Show Romney Ahead – NYTimes.com.)

Something Fishy In Romney’s Taxes

Seth Anderson1 Comment

A Fool Too Long
A Fool Too Long

The truth is Mitt Romney will probably be able to skate over the full release of his tax history, as there isn’t a law that says Romney has to release his records, much less multiple years. Still, seems clear that there is some funky stuff contained in prior years.

[Senator Carl ] Levin (D-MI) may well know more about tax avoidance strategies than anybody in Congress. In his capacity as the Democrats’ top investigator he’s has made extensive inquiries into the techniques businesses and individuals use, including overseas havens, to hide their money from the IRS. And what Romney’s revealed so far troubles him.

“I saw in the paper this morning that the spokesperson for the Romney campaign said that it was just an ‘ordinary’ bank account in Switzerland,” Levin told reporters at a Christian Science Monitor breakfast round table, referring to the revelation that the Romney family held a Swiss bank account in his wife’s name from 2003 until 2010.

“Folks, we’ve done a lot of research. We went after UBS in my subcommittee. We have seen abuses by American wealthy folks trying to hide from Uncle Sam, putting their money in Swiss bank accounts and bank accounts in other tax havens,” Levin said. “There was a period when the IRS said ‘OK, come on in, pay your taxes on your Swiss accounts, and you won’t have to pay any penalty.’ Thirty-three thousand people, I believe, showed up in the last couple years to pay their taxes…. And the spokesperson for the Romney campaign says it was just an ordinary bank account in Switzerland that Mrs. Romney had. There is no such thing as an ordinary Swiss bank account. Now, there may be a few exceptions where you’ve got Americans who are living in Switzerland who have bank accounts, but as far as I know, Mrs. Romney was not living in Switzerland.”

(click here to continue reading Top Dem Offshoring Expert Smells Something Fishy In Romney’s Tax Code | TPMDC.)

 

Saul Alinsky: who is he and why does Newt Gingrich keep mentioning him

Seth Anderson1 Comment

Fist Bumps
Fist Bumps

Sadly, I wondered the same thing. All I knew about Saul Alinsky is that he was once a community organizer in Chicago…

Unless you’ve been paying close attention to the undercurrents of right-wing US politics over the last five years, you might have missed an obscure name from the 1960s who has been hoisted into a hate figure: Saul Alinsky.

Alinsky died nearly 30 years ago but thanks to a tenuous link to Barack Obama, his name has been raised as evidence of Obama’s radical roots. Newt Gingrich, the current front-runner for the Republican nomination, repeatedly denounces Obama as “a classic Saul Alinsky radical” on the campaign trail.

When Gingrich won the South Carolina primary on Saturday, his victory speech sought to distinguish what he called “American exceptionalism versus the radicalism of Saul Alinsky” of Obama.

Gingrich has merely tapped into a fulmination against Alinsky – who was what passes for a left-wing radical in American politics, agitating for better living conditions for the poor in the slums of Chicago and New York – that has been filtered through the likes of right-wing talkshow hosts such as Glenn Beck and Mark Levin.

The connection with Obama is that his career as a community organiser included work for an Alinsky-inspired group in Chicago, while a profile of Obama by Ryan Lizza in the New Republic in 2007 said Obama “taught Alinsky’s concepts and methods”:

(click here to continue reading Saul Alinsky: who is he and why does Newt Gingrich keep mentioning him? | World news | guardian.co.uk.)

I should read Rules For Radicals, at least once…

In Rules for Radicals, for example, he responds to the demands by youth frustrated at the continuation of the Vietnam war by the Democratic party after the political battles and riots of 1968:

It hurt me to see the American army with bayonets advancing on American boys and girls. But the answer I gave to the young radicals seemed to me the only realistic one: “Do one of three things. One, go and find a wailing wall and feel sorry for yourselves. Two, go psycho and start bombing – but this will only swing people to the right. Three, learn a lesson. Go home, organise, build power and at the next convention, you be the delegates.


Much of Alinsky’s advice about to bring about change in modern political climate is now so mainstream that it would hardly be recognised as radical.

The President on the Picket Line
The President on the Picket Line

From Nicholas von Hoffman:

Dead almost forty years, Saul Alinsky is still with us. The political genius who invented community organizing is given the credit (or the blame) for such left-leaning organizations as ACORN and the United Farm Workers. Now the election of the first African-American president is often ascribed to him.

But lately it’s the rightwardly inclined who are running around with copies of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals in their back pockets. During the battle for healthcare reform and its bitter aftermath, the Tea Partyers used Alinsky’s Rules as a recipe for brewing the mayhem that has won them so much attention. Alinsky has even been made recommended reading by such reactionaries as Dick Armey, who says Alinsky “was very good at what he did, but what he did was not good.”

A year and a half into President Obama’s term, Alinsky’s fame on the right continues to grow while his influence on the administration has faded. Were he around today, Alinsky in his turn might look askance at the failure to create a people’s administration, an opportunity made possible by Obama’s unique campaign organization.

Alinsky believed that the beginning of everything political was to know yourself and the terrain you were operating on. So he probably would have cautioned Obama that all the power of the presidency—its prestige, that damn bully pulpit, the helicopter and those gleaming marines saluting at every doorway—would not suffice. Obama, who had promised an enormous agenda for change, would not have the power to deliver the goods his strongest supporters were hoping for. Alinsky would have predicted that Obama could not rely on a Democratic Party whose fitful loyalties are shaped by the ravenous conflicting interests members of Congress answer to.

Without a doubt Saul, a battler himself, would have admired Obama’s battle to get the healthcare bill passed. Not since Woodrow Wilson’s national tour to win US acceptance of the League of Nations has a president fought so hard for a significant measure as did Obama. The attempt broke Wilson’s health and that, Alinsky might have said, underscores the impossibility of a president, even such an eloquent and energetic one, carrying the whole load alone. What Obama needed was Organizing for America, the once dynamic, self-starting group of street-level campaign workers that got him elected president but has degenerated into an ordinary political organization taking its marching orders from Washington.

(click here to continue reading Advice From Saul Alinsky | The Nation.)